Down with Big Brother (73 page)

L
EAVING
K
ARADŽIĆ’S HEADQUARTERS ON
that golden fall afternoon, I felt a stab of nostalgia for a city and a way of life that seemed threatened with extinction. Sarajevo, built along a narrow river valley, surrounded by high mountains, was a seductive blend of East and West, old and new. The slender minarets of dozens of mosques dotted the hillsides, next to squat Orthodox churches and solid Austro-Hungarian buildings like the post office and Bosnian presidency. The cobblestoned old town, the Baš-čaršija, was a blaze of oriental bustle and color. Farther along the Miljačka Valley were the modern skyscrapers of the Communist era, which would have been eyesores in many other places but added to the city’s eclectic charm. Full of coffeehouses and nightclubs, Sarajevo was a tolerant, hedonistic city, echoing with gaiety and laughter.

It was in Sarajevo that I had first felt the distant rumbling of the political earthquake that was to sweep away the old order. It was May 4, 1980, a Sunday. I entered the city at dusk, having just driven up from Dubrovnik, through the Neretva Valley. The traffic seemed unusually chaotic, cars rushing in all directions, ignoring the most elementary traffic regulations. When I checked into the Europa Hotel in the Baš-čaršija, the receptionist was crying. He told me that Tito had died less than an hour before. Like many people in Sarajevo, he was terrified by the thought of what would happen to his country now that the man who had held it together for thirty-five years was gone. The television in the corner of the reception was showing old newsreel footage of Tito threatening to deliver a decisive rebuff to any invader. “In the same way we fought the Germans in the war, we were ready to fight in 1948, we are ready to fight now, and we will be ready to fight in the future too, when I am gone,” the old marshal was declaring.

Bosnia had remained at peace for more than a decade after Tito’s death, but its luck was now running out. The threat was coming not from without—as Tito had suggested—but from within. The legitimate government was attempting to deal with a fifth column, right in its midst, and was too weak to defend itself effectively. The Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo and Belgrade had resorted to a proven technique of aggression. As I walked away from my meeting with Karadžić, I was reminded of the situation in Czechoslovakia, prior to the Nazi takeover in 1938. By whipping up the nationalist
sentiment of the German population in the Sudetenland, the Nazis were able to occupy the entire country with very little resistance. The rest of the world stood by and did nothing.

It did not take a great deal of imagination to predict the fate that awaited Sarajevo in the event of war. It already had a name, Vukovar.

VUKOVAR
November 19, 1991

W
HEN THE
Y
UGOSLAV ARMY
and Serb militiamen finally entered Vukovar after shelling it mercilessly for eighty-seven days, they discovered a nightmarish wasteland of death and destruction. Bullet-riddled bodies littered the rubble-strewn streets; stray dogs wandered amid the burning apartment buildings; burned-out cars and tanks lined roads strewn with land mines; survivors emerged blinking into the sunlight from their cellars and basements, crying in horror at the scene of devastation around them. Not a single wall, door, or roof seemed to have escaped the downpour of artillery shells, bombs, and bullets. Even the trees had been chopped to pieces.

Before the war began, Vukovar was a charming town on the Danube River, known for its baroque churches and large shoe factory. Now it resembled a picture of Dresden after the Allied bombing campaign. Europe had not witnessed destruction like this since the Second World War. The Serb victors spoke of “liberating” Vukovar from the Croatian “fascists,” but there was precious little left to “liberate.” If there was ever a case of destroying a city in order to save it, this was it.

For Croats, Vukovar had become a symbol of their determination to resist Serbian aggression. It was their Stalingrad. For weeks Radio Vukovar
had been broadcasting messages from its weak UHF transmitter: “Vukovar is still fighting. Vukovar has not fallen.” The town was defended by some fifteen hundred poorly armed policemen and volunteers. Yet for almost three months, they held out against an attacking force of some twenty thousand men, supported by tanks, artillery, and aircraft. When the JNA sent a column of tanks into the suburb of Borovo Naselje in mid-September, it was decimated by Croat militiamen, using shoulder-held grenade launchers. Unable to capture Vukovar in a ground assault, the JNA changed tactics and pulverized the town from the air with rockets, mortars, and bombs. Forced to take refuge in the basements, the townspeople drank rainwater and ate stale crusts of bread in order to survive. Many died for lack of medical care.

Atrocities were committed on both sides. Rival commanders thought nothing of executing civilians for suspected treachery or merely because of their ethnic origin. In addition to the thousands of people who lost their lives as a result of the shelling, hundreds simply disappeared. Fighting was particularly fierce around the Borovo shoe factory, on the northern approaches to the town.

When the JNA and Serb militia groups closed in on Vukovar in early November, the Croat defenders fought for every house and every cellar, until they ran out of ammunition. Several hundred defenders managed to escape across the cornfields. Several hundred others surrendered to the army and were reasonably well treated. Croat fighters who were captured by Serb irregulars were often executed on the spot, sometimes in full view of the foreign journalists who had been permitted to witness the final “liberation” of the city.
⁹

By the time their ordeal was finally over, both Serb and Croat survivors were too shell-shocked to display much relief. “My life has no meaning anymore,” said Marina Rodić, a Croat woman, who lost her husband and her son during the fighting. “Nobody won in Vukovar, we all lost,” said Milan Bosnić, a Serb who spent sixty-three days in a cellar.
¹⁰

The most controversial incidents occurred at the hospital, which had taken dozens of direct hits during the course of the fighting. The basement was full of injured soldiers and civilians. On November 19 the facility was cordoned off by JNA troops and Serb paramilitaries. The United Nations peace envoy, Cyrus Vance, attempted to gain access but was rebuffed by a JNA officer, Major Veselin Slavančinin, commander of the artillery units that had flattened much of the city.
¹¹
The major claimed that the hospital was mined, and he could not guarantee the safety of international observers.
But both sides agreed that the 420 Croat patients in the hospital would be evacuated to Croatian-held territory.

The following day the Serb soldiers separated two hundred lightly wounded male patients from the other patients. “They ordered anybody who was able to walk to board the buses which were waiting at the back door of the hospital,” recalled Viktor Đurisić, a severely injured Borovo factory worker. “We never saw these people again.”
¹²

According to eyewitness testimony compiled by United Nations experts, the prisoners were taken to a large building used as a garage for farm equipment in the nearby village of Ovčara. Here they were beaten so severely that at least two men were killed. Serb soldiers then divided them into groups of about twenty men. “One by one, each group was loaded onto a truck and driven away. At intervals of about fifteen to twenty minutes, the truck returned empty and another group was loaded onto it.”
¹³

Following information provided by a Croat who managed to escape from the truck, UN investigators located a mass grave at the head of a wooded ravine, five minutes down the road from Ovčara. There were hundreds of bullet holes in nearby trees and piles of spent Kalashnikov cartridges on the ground. Roman Catholic crosses and rosary beads found on several exhumed bodies indicated that the corpses were Croat rather than Serb. After examining the site, the experts concluded that the executioners had stood “on the northwest side of the grave [and shot] diagonally toward the southeast and into the trees.” The forensic evidence of a massacre was buttressed by eyewitness testimony. “Since five in the afternoon to one in the morning, we were killing them in Ovčara,” a Serb paramilitary was reported to have boasted, while swigging back plum brandy over breakfast. “They were begging, crying, and pleading that they had not been shooting our people.”
¹⁴

Over the next few years many more such atrocities were committed, both in Croatia and in Bosnia. Half a century after the civilized world had learned about the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and vowed, “Never again,” concentration camps and torture centers were once again established on European soil. Words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” once again entered the vocabulary. By the time a peace agreement was finally reached in late 1995, an estimated quarter of a million people had been killed in the former Yugoslavia, and nearly three million driven from their homes.

The destruction arid killing of Vukovar were repeated, in seemingly endless variations, in Dubrovnik, Tbilisi, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Dushanbe,
Grozny, and dozens of smaller towns and villages across the former Communist world. Vukovar was only the beginning.

W
ESTERN LEADERS HAD
the opportunity—some would say the historical obligation—to step in before the fighting got out of hand. Yugoslavia was, in part, an American creation. President Woodrow Wilson had taken the lead in creating a kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, from the rubble of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. After World War II the country had been a key element in the East-West balancing act. The United States extended informal security guarantees to Yugoslavia to forestall a Soviet invasion after Tito had broken away from Moscow in 1948. U.S. officials visiting Belgrade never missed the opportunity to voice support for the country’s “independence, nonalignment, and territorial integrity.”

It had been clear for some time that Yugoslavia was headed for a violent breakup. In October 1990 the Central Intelligence Agency issued a confidential report predicting that the country would fall apart within eighteen months. The CIA believed there was a “high probability” that the policies of nationalist brinkmanship pursued by Milošević and Tuđman would plunge the country into civil war.
¹⁵

Instead of acting on these warnings, the Bush administration treated the crisis as a primarily European matter. For most of 1991 President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III had been preoccupied by the Gulf War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Accustomed to the geostrategic certainties of the Cold War, they linked the U.S. national interest in Europe almost exclusively to the containment of communism. The Western failure in Yugoslavia was a failure, above all, of political imagination. The collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had produced a state of false euphoria in Western capitals. There was boastful talk about a “new world order” and “the end of history.” Seduced by their own rhetoric, American policy makers failed to see that nationalism was replacing communism as the principal threat facing the Western democracies and that Yugoslavia would be the first real battleground of the post-Communist era.

Far from coming to an end, history was just getting started again, after a forced hiatus of many decades. The Yugoslav crisis was emblematic of the kind of challenge that would soon become characteristic of the new epoch. Other Miloševićs and Tuđmans were springing up all over the former Communist world. The Cold War was giving way to a new kind of ideological struggle. On one side were those who believed in the American ideal of a
pluralistic democracy, based on free markets, free institutions, and free speech. On the other were those who had a political and economic interest in erecting barriers to the free exchange of people, goods, and ideas. By whipping up ethnic hatreds that had lain dormant for decades, the Communists-turned-nationalists were able to perpetuate their own power.

Like communism, nationalism had a natural ability to reproduce itself, until checked by a superior force or brought down by its internal contradictions. It thrived in conditions of economic chaos, offering ready-made scapegoats and ostensibly painless solutions to deep-seated problems. By the end of 1991 the virus of nationalism had spread to large parts of Eastern Europe, casting a shadow over the democratic achievements of the previous two years. The visitor had the impression of traveling back in a time machine to 1945 or 1917. Flags, national symbols, political parties, even street names had been revived—all as they had been before the Communists came to power. It was as if the region had suddenly woken up from a long political hibernation.

In some countries the virus of nationalism assumed a relatively benign form. One such case was Czechoslovakia, where Czechs and Slovaks were able to work out a reasonably amicable divorce. In many other places, however, it was a recipe for fratricidal war. By the fall of 1991 the seeds of future disaster had already been sown in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. In the Caucasus a retired Soviet air force general named Dzokhar Dudayev was busy forming his own sixty-thousand-strong army. Within weeks he was to declare himself president of Chechnya, a country that few Westerners even knew existed.

There was a limit, of course, to what Western governments could do to contain the nationalist genie. America had never shown any interest in the Caucasus. Yugoslavia, however, was another matter. The country straddled a centuries-old geopolitical fault line between Byzantium and Rome, Islam and Christianity, East and West. The United States had already been dragged into two world wars sparked off by conflicts in Eastern Europe. During the Cold War successive American presidents had made clear that they would react vigorously to Soviet aggression in Yugoslavia. If the West was prepared to stand up to the newly resurgent forces of nationalism, then surely this was the place.